A woman, a boy, a chair

Driving along the narrow tracks of Barcelona this morning, I felt a little uncomfortable. I saw a woman in a white robe standing outside the open door of her bathroom. I say 'door'; it was a sheet of metal bent and nailed into the splotchy cement wall. I say 'bathroom'; it was a small square roughly the size of my desk about two metres high with a very ventilated roof. I say 'her' but it was a communal sheet of bent metal covering the entrance to a communal toilet. Not her sheet, not her toilet. So she's standing outside the door in this white robe and slip-slops, staring st something inside.

I saw a camping chair, only the one, sitting on a flattened sandy patch between two shacks. Further down the road there was a little boy holding a dustpan in his hands, not cleaning, just holding it. Standing languidly next to a gate, holding this dustpan and waiting maybe? So I'm driving past this woman and this chair and this boy with his dustpan and I'm feeling uncomfortable. I didn't come to see them, didn't come to look and observe and gaze. So why do I feel so intrusive? As though I've pried open the corrugated curtains framing their lives and peered into their privacy?

It might be the proximity. We are so close. There can't be more than a few metres between where I sit and where they stand. It forces an intimacy, an unwilling and transient intimacy. Intimacy can feel so heavy, so imposed. And I felt that weight as I drove slowly over the uneven dips and mounds of the gravel paths in Barcelona. That's the thing with suburbs and streets; there's space. There's something tangible that separates you from other people, that allows you to pass them without invading them. See, there's a vulnerability right, about being at home. And someone seeing you at home. When someone comes to your home, you can't hide anything, you can't choose what they see. They see everything. So you're standing there in your home and this stranger drives by and your life lies bare and unsheltered. Space, or a lack of it, makes the visitor a voyeur.

I have no problem being confronted by privilege and poverty, it's part of the South African experience. But when the objects and subjects of each don't have the agency to engage in that confrontation on their own terms, then it makes me uncomfortable. I wanted to pull my cap over my eyes, sink into my seat and remove myself from their space. Instead, I wonder what the woman was looking at, who the boy was waiting for, why that chair was sitting there alone.

"So we're in Barcelona?" the driver interrupts my thoughts.
"Ya," I said, "Barcelona."
"Not so much Spain."
"No." I answered. I looked around again, now looking for something: "I think we need to make a right where the road forks."
He slowed down as we crescendoed the light slope; the road forked into three. I don't remember three roads, one must have been added since my last visit. I look for a landmark that feels familiar.
"Ya, that one," I point. I crane my neck forward, looking for the white containers I hope will be to our right soon. I snap back into my seat as a woman in a fuchsia pink tracksuit walks into view. Then I smile at her and she smiles back. I breathe.
"Ok ya," I say, "ya keep driving."

On the otherside of the wind

I went to a part of Gugs yesterday that I've never been before; Barcelona informal settlement. It's just opposite the cemetery on Klipfontein Road, only a couple of blocks down from Mzoli's. I drove behind the director of the organization I was visiting and turned off Klipfontein onto an untarred lane. For a while I was so focused on negotiating the rocky bulges and dips of the road that I didn't really notice what I was driving past. When the road evened out a little, I looked up. I've spent years in Cape Town's townships, in formal and less formal areas. Barcelona is something else.

It's been really windy in Cape Town these last few weeks, but in a world of buildings with solid foundations, you can't really see the wind. You can feel it around you, feel it moving and breathing and gusting, but it's presence is always transient. When it's gone all that's left of its temporality are displaced leaves and litter. At least in the parts of the city that are west of the airport...

So when I lifted my eyes from the stony ground to the shacks around me, I wasn't expecting to see the wind. But I did. I saw the wind hanging off flapping wooden planks, I saw it dance around corrugated roofs that bounced. Residents have tried putting tires, rubble, anything with a bit of weight really, they've put it all on those roofs to keep them from dancing with the wind, but dance they do. I saw the wind in the gaps and the holes and the funnels and the absences. I saw the wind where other things used to be. It bends my mind really, that the DA tends to blame "third forces" for service-delivery protests in places like Barcelona. I invite them and their bright blue Tshirts to go and look in the gaps and in the holes and in the funnels and to show me where those third forces sit waiting. Go and turn over the rocks too heavy to have been moved by the wind and show me where those third forces hide. Because surely there's no actual reason for the people who live here to be anything less than satisfied.

We stood in the wind, shouting at one another over the noise that it made as it flew past the pale yellow shipping containers, as it banged on the walls, fighting to enter the classroom within.
"I know it doesn't look like much, but we've really made some changes here," the director tells me.
"No I can see," and I can. The stony ground has been flattened, the litter and weeds removed. Two of the three containers are freshly painted and there's a fence that encircles the property.
"Let me show you the back," he says.
I follow him around the containers, walking carefully between three wet circles on the shaded ground. There is no water here, no bathroom. When the children need to pee, they come out here.
"When we painted the container, we really struggled. We couldn't get the weeds out so we squashed them down."
The scrubby bushes are flattened at places, their stems bent into the ground.
"The ground is just too hard here, we couldn't get the plants out. So we just stood on them instead."

We walk back to the central courtyard and then back up the gently sloping hill to where we've parked our cars. "You've got to think what it will look like in 5 years, maybe 10 or 15," he tells me.
"Yes," I agree, "you've got to have vision."
Vision, imagination, hope. I try to see something else as I stand there in the creeping heat. I try to fill the absences with colour, try to smooth the unruly edges into coherency. The wind beats against me so I shake his hand and retreat to the still bubble of my car.

The City Press published an aerial photo of Nkandla last week, it didn't look anything like this.

Of Mud and Marxism

There is only so much traipsing about in the muddy cold that I can deal with. Particularly when it starts raining. I'm spending the week with a visitor from our home campus in California, taking her around to some of our partner organizations. Today we visited a micro-farming collective in Gugs and Philippi. More accurately, we went on a tour of the organization's community farms with 17 Americans who are piloting a drip irrigation system. They are "consulting interns" from the "Community Enterprise Solutions" arm of the "New Development Group". My visiting colleague articulated my feelings on their wordy origins perfectly, with the adequately descriptive: "You can't make that shit up."

When they first emerged from their van, there was a moment that we considered placing bets on what country they were from, but it took all of a few seconds' assessment of their backpacks and jeggings to claim in unison, "American!" (Two friends of mine recently explained the jeggings phenomenon to me and I was very pleased to be able to put my new-found knowledge to good use.)

It's a really unfair stereotype. I've placed close to 50 American students in service organizations this year, and the only uniform statement that I can make about them is that they've all been different. Some of them have been great; very sensitive and critical, with no stronger desire than to avoid being the stereotype. Some of them have been less great. But the group this morning, hells. Maybe it was the cold that turned me against them, maybe it was the "we've come to do a needs assessment and then give you what we have already decided that you need" vibe going on. The tour-guide, an epically amazing man who has spent the last 20 years with this organization, explained to them that they have tried drip irrigation before and it didn't work. He also explained in late 1970s Marxist discourse how we are all slaves to the neo-liberal supermarket empire. His words and phrases were more than faintly reminiscent of what Morpheus said to Neo about the red and blue pill.

Ya, so it was just an odd morning. Left-wing extremists and International Development Practitioners, mud and rain. In the end, all I really wanted was a peanut butter sandwich and a cup of rooibos, away from it all.

A foray into the foreign

I've got to admit, Gugs is not my usual stomping ground. Nyanga, Samora Machel, Philippi, oh Khayelitsha ofcourse, but seldom do I venture into Joo-Joo-le-twa. So it was all a bit disconcerting yesterday when I found myself driving around the area, in a van carrying far more people than it should have been, (almost) ofcourse. It was my last site visit of the quarter, so now Imma be office-bound for the next couple of weeks. Not looking forward to long days with my Mac, but I'll make it work.

So Gugs. Its claim to fame is most likely Mzoli's; place of beer and braaimeat/shishanyama. Maybe the Gugulethu Seven for those in the history-know, and potentially Amy Biehl for Americans who volunteer there. I was out with one of my students and his Hip-Hop crew. I watched them popping, locking, tutting--moves inspired by the Egyptian king, Tutankhamun, all very angular like a lived translation of some fruity hieroglyphics--and mixing it up with the hlokoloza dance. It was a vibe. The spaza shop over the road sold packets and boxes, tins and bottles, the shop-owner had a French accent. While we waited for the bus we listened to the school's marimba band. Marimbas always sound so much more than they are, and this band had a regular drum-set to complement the woody hollows, so it was all Jungle Book meets Toy Story meets the irregularly tarred playground that they were jamming on.

The drive on the way home took us to the part of Gugs near the railway line, where there are houses and decent roads, and the prevalence of postboxes is unavoidably noticeable. It's a permanent, paved driveway kind of place. A place just around a few corners from corrugated iron and tyres on the roof to keep the black plastic down when it rains and winds. Being in this kind of setting sometimes makes me feel like I've accidentally fallen asleep and missed out on the transition zone between genres of whatever it is that I'm seeing or hearing and it all just happens at once and at everything.